9 Your Principles of Management Survivor’s Guide (7/42) -- Principles of Management

9 Your Principles of Management Survivor’s Guide Learning Objectives - Know your learning style. - Know how to match your style to the circumstances. - Use the gauge-discover-reflect framework. Principles of management courses typically combine knowledge about skills and the development and application of those skills themselves. For these reasons, it is helpful for you to develop your own strategy for learning about and developing management skills. The first part of this strategy should be based on your own disposition toward learning. The second part of this strategy should follow some form of the gauge-discover-reflect process that we outline at the end of this section. Assess Your Learning Style You can assess your learning style in a number of ways. At a very general level, you can assess your style intuitively (see “What Is Your Intuition about Your Learning Style?”); however, we suggest that you use a survey instrument like the Learning Style Index (LSI), the output from which you can then readily compare with your intuition. In this section, we discuss the dimensions of the LSI that you can complete easily and quickly online. The survey will reveal whether your learning style is active or reflective, sensory or intuitive, visual or verbal, and sequential or global.This section is based heavily on the work of Richard K. Felder and Linda K. Silverman. In addition to their research, there is an online instrument used to assess preferences on four dimensions (active or reflective, sensing or intuitive, visual or verbal, and sequential or global) of a learning style model formulated by Felder and Soloman of North Carolina State University. The Learning Styles Index (LSI) may be used at no cost for noncommercial purposes by individuals who wish to determine their own learning style profile and by educators who wish to use it for teaching, advising, or research. What Is Your Intuition About Your Learning Style? Your learning style may be defined in large part by the answers to four questions: - How do you prefer to process information: actively—through engagement in physical activity or discussion? Or reflectively—through introspection? - What type of information do you preferentially perceive: sensory (external)—sights, sounds, physical sensations? Or intuitive (internal)—possibilities, insights, hunches? - Through which sensory channel is external information most effectively perceived: visual—pictures, diagrams, graphs, demonstrations? Or verbal—words, sounds? (Other sensory channels like touch, taste, and smell are relatively untapped in most educational environments, and are not considered here.) - How do you progress toward understanding: sequentially—in continual steps? Or globally—in large jumps, holistically? TRY IT OUT HERE: http://www.engr.ncsu.edu/learningstyles/ilsweb.html Active and Reflective Learners Everybody is active sometimes and reflective sometimes. Your preference for one category or the other may be strong, moderate, or